Place · Unani medical centre · India
Unani institutions, Hyderabad
Also known as Hyderabad — Unani medicine institutions
The Unani medical institutions of Hyderabad built up under the Asaf Jahi Nizams (1724-1948) and the modern Indian state — the subcontinent's chief Unani (Greco-Arabic medical) centre since the 19th century. The Nizamia Tibbi College (founded 1891 by Hakim Mohammed Ali Khan under Nizam Mahbub Ali Khan) remains the oldest surviving Unani medical college in India. The Central Research Institute of Unani Medicine (1979, since 2006 as the Central Research Institute of Unani Medicine, CRIUM) is the government's chief Unani research centre. The Hyderabad Unani tradition traces to Hakim Nabina (1690s) and the 18th-century Persian immigration patterns of Qutb Shahi and early Asaf Jahi Hyderabad. About 450,000 patients are treated by Hyderabad Unani institutions annually.
- Date
- 1800–2026
- Function
- Science & medicine
- Patron dynasty
- Asaf Jahi / Nizam
- Condition
- living practice
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 17.390, 78.490
Connections (5)
- Traveller routeAgra Fort
Tavernier made six voyages to India between the 1630s and 1660s buying gems, moving between the Mughal court at Agra, the Golconda diamond fields and the Deccan cities, and his Travels is the most detailed European account of the seventeenth-century Indian trade in stones. The route shown here is representative of his commercial circuit rather than a single journey; he made the run repeatedly over thirty years.
- Traveller routeRaigad
Tavernier crossed the Deccan repeatedly between the 1630s and 1660s on his way between Surat, Golconda and the diamond fields, and his Travels is the fullest European account of that interior in the century when Maratha power was forming in the same hills. The route shown is representative of his commercial circuit rather than a single journey; he made the run six times over thirty years and describes the roads, the escorts and the tolls.
- Teaching lineageDarul Uloom Deoband
The Nizam's state founded the Nizamia Tibbi College in 1889 and Deoband had opened in 1866, so two very different Indian Muslim institutional answers to the colonial period were being built in the same generation — one a seminary refusing state money and English, the other a state-funded medical college teaching a Greek-Arabic science in Urdu. Both were attempts to keep an inherited body of knowledge working under new conditions.
- Site withinHyderabad
Hyderabad under the Asaf Jahis became the subcontinent's principal centre of Unani medical practice and training in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: Nizamia Tibbi College was founded in 1890 and the Central Research Institute of Unani Medicine in the 1970s. The teaching families and the hospitals are concentrated in the old city around Charminar, which made the city the Persianate medical capital of the Deccan long after the court language had switched.
- Peer institutionJamia Hamdard, New Delhi
Jamia Hamdard (Delhi) and the Nizāmia Tibbi College and hospital complex (Hyderabad) are India's two leading Unani teaching institutions.
On these journeys
Sources
Institutional histories of Nizamia Tibbi College and Central Research Institute of Unani Medicine; histories of Unani in Hyderabad.
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